Wednesday, February 24, 2016

This was a fast one! Milestone 3 took me exactly 3 weeks or 15 days to complete. The next two milestones should more or less fall into the same category so we should begin to mentally prepare for an April release of Chapter 8. Here's the preview image of milestone 3:

In other news: we've reached 100 patrons on Patreon and as a little gift I've created an original gouache painting that was given to one randomly picked patron:

A 25 minutes long commented timelapse recording of the creation of this painting is available to all my patron on Patreon.com!

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

It feels good to finally be on track again! Today I've finished the second milestone of Chapter 8 and it was about time to reach that point. The last milestone had been reached 3 months ago and I was beginning to feel nervous about the progress of Chapter 8 although I knew exactly what caused this delay.

In November the fulfillment of the last kickstarter campaign took much too much time from my production schedule and when I had finished the main bulk of that work, I had already decided that I wanted to produce the Christmas Special. The last third of December was eaten up by the Holidays and I was able to start my work on the second milestone not earlier than January. And I still wasn't going full steam.

An important part of my kickstarter fulfillment hadn't been finished yet. I had to paint 4 original gouache paintings, a task I originally had planned for the evenings. But it turned out that I wasn't able to do the paintings in the evenings, there just wasn't enough creative juice left after a long production day. So I decided to take a day off from production for each painting, and although I lost 4 production days (which is nearly a week) doing that, it was a good decision. For 4 weeks, every Monday was "Gouache Monday" and I really enjoyed these days. It was hard work for me to paint those paintings and I felt like a complete newbie. Mixing real colors is such a hard challenge when all you know is the Color Picker in Photoshop. I became better with every painting and in the last one I was actually able to mix and put down exactly the colors I was looking for. Here are the results:

My original plan was to finish the milestone in January but it turned out that this milestone contained a lot of complicated artwork. The protagonists are leaving the big city and I want it to be a proper farewell with lots of majestic vistas. I worked nearly 140 hours on this milestone which comes close to the 160-hours-monster-milestone of Chapter 6. However, the rest of the chapter is promising to be finished much faster. There's still plenty of ambitious imagery ahead but it's going to be nature scenes (and some of them quite dark) which will take much less time then the detailed cityscapes I commited to in my depiction of Kingspeak. I'm really relieved that the story moves on to new sceneries now. Painting architecture is exhausting. Everything has to be in perspective and you can't be as sloppy in the details as you can be in nature scenes. Still I'm going to miss the narrow alleys of Kingspeak. Of course we will see more of it in later chapters but this will be more like short spotlights. The big exploration of the city is over. I guess it will be fun to return to the chapters 6, 7 and, 8 now and then to dive back into this place.

Here are the preview images from this milestone:

As always I'd like to remind you that I'm posting weekly updates on my Patreon page so if you are interested in much more preview images for this milestone, and other behind the scenes info, have a look!

I hope to finish the third milestone before the end of this month. See you then!